Book Review: Unicorn Food
Katie 
Unicorn Food: Natural Recipes for Edible Rainbows is everything that your colorful food eating self could ever desire. The aim is to eat a rainbow, but a healthy one. These recipes are both balanced and colorful and will delight your eyes as well as your taste buds. There are ways to make natural food coloring using cabbage, blueberry juice, tumeric, spinach, etc. I’m not exactly sure how these will end up making foods that taste delicious, but I’ll keep reading…
OK so all of these recipes have pictures to go along with them (yaaay!) and look AMAAAAAAAAAZING. I don’t know if I could ever actually make any of them (and if I did I’d probably use regular food coloring even though it is probably terrible for me) but omg. Rainbow sushi? pancakes? cheesecake? I will take them all, please and thank you.
If you are as on the unicorn train as I am, you’re not going to want to miss this book. Even if you just want to look at the pretty pictures and not actually end up making anything, it’s worth checking out.
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.
About the Book
No unicorns were harmed in the making of this food! But unicorns have magically inspired all the recipes in this book adding technicolor sparkle to your sushi and fairytale magic to your mocktails. Why eat boring when you can enjoy a rainbow-coloured noodle bowl for dinner? And it’s all deliciously natural – no nasty e-numbers or preservatives, just beautiful food colorings made from berry juices and vegetables. From the show-stopping Unicorn Cake and Cosmic Donuts to Rainbow Veggie Sandwiches and Celestial Swirl Soup, these brightly colored edibles can be naughty and nice. Create the most unbelievably Instagrammable dishes ever seen. Cook, post and enjoy and the likes will multiple. Move over mug cakes. This is internet explosion unites the zeitgeist for all things magical, pastel, and unicorn-esque. Brightly colored, and not too serious, Unicorn Food is shared experience – how could you not want to share such amazing and magical delights created in your own kitchen – and all natural and vegetarian.
I have never made my own ice cream outside of Science class in High School and somehow ours came out tasting really salty. Make Your Own Ice Cream includes classic recipes for Ice Cream, Sorbet, Italian Ice, Sherbet and Other Frozen Desserts. The recipes all have very few ingredients, but the actual making of the ice cream seems to be a bit advanced – double boilers, using frying pans… I am not sure that I am ready for that kind of work, but some of these flavors do sound delicious! It starts out with Philadelphia Creams, then Neapolitan Creams, Ice Creams from Condensed Milk – that comes with a warning that these are not as good as those made from raw cream, Frozen Puddings and Desserts, Water Ices and Sherbets or Sorbets, Frozen Fruits, Frappes Parfaits and Mousses, and finally Sauces for Ice Creams.
Amazing Origami Boxes includes 20 origami models with instructions and diagrams. There are some really cool ones included – I can tell just from the cover! The book starts with the biography of Tomko Fuse – “the queen of modular origami” who wrote this book and came up with these amazing designs. The book has 3 degrees of difficulty – Medium, Medium to Advanced and Advanced. Each one is noted by 1, 2 or 3 dots. There are also guides to the different kinds of folds that you will find in the instructions. All of these designs seem to be a bit over my head, so I guess I am not quite at “Medium” level yet – probably still a “beginner”. The basket with triangular handles looks amazing, I thought the cube box was awesome – then I turned the page and there was a DOUBLE cube box… My mind is blown. And the Tulip cup and Rose box may be some of the pretties origami I’ve ever seen. Makes me wish I had some paper to try it out – even though I know I would end up failing miserably.
Ahh, Crochet. Something that I always say I want to learn to do but never do anything with it beyond reading books about it and looking at the pretty pictures. This time I am reading all about how to make various crochet flowers. The book contains 30 fabulous flowers and projects. Most of these flowers are done with a loom, which might be a bit easier for me to figure out… even though it features a handful of different kinds of looms. It then goes in to talk about what kinds of yarns you should use as well as colors – this page was especially interesting because it showed the same flower made with 12(!) different color sets and they all looked wildly different from each other. Then it goes into different techniques for different flowers. BRB, buying myself a loom, these are all so pretty!!!! It also features some crochet techniques as well. These all go over my head but there are photos included with the instructions so if you have any idea what you are doing it should be easy to follow the stitching instructions. Then you can join everything together to make really fun flowery things like doilies or I suppose even blankets if you have enough flowers made!
Coding from Scratch is a book about using Scratch to code. I had used this once as part of a class I was auditing and it was a lot of fun, although I kind of got stumped at one point and gave it up, so I was curious to check out this book to see if it would give me some more information so maybe I could play around a bit more. If you’re unaware, Scratch is an online coding platform that uses colorful coding blocks to create. Rather than actually writing the code out in text, you move what look almost like colorful puzzle pieces around to build loops and actions quickly and easily. You can sign up for an account at www.scratch.mit.edu. The first parts of the book go over how to create and set up your account and what all the tools mean and do. You can then make your own games pretty easily. The book also notes some components that you should think about before you start like – where does your game take place? What are the rules for what you can and can’t do? There are also some examples you can copy to re-make some games so that you can get a feel for how everything works before you dive in and do you own games.
Yankee’s has put together over 400 essential things to see and do in New England. Even though I have lived in New England my whole life, I know that there is still TONS I have yet to see and do so I was interested to read this book and see how I rate on what I’ve already done and what fun and adventurous things are still out there to do! (And maybe get some fun not too far date ideas?) For those of you who are geographically challenged (and I am, but I’d probably never have graduated if I didn’t figure out what was New England) New England consists of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. All of which I have visited at some point (and all but Vermont I have seen a Hanson show in. Fun fact.) The book is broken down by state, with my state, Connecticut, up first. I’ll highlight each state with what I have done and what I’d like to do below! (But keep in mind there will be lots of other things included in the book too if you don’t see something that seems interesting!)